this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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Canada has more manufacturing jobs per capita than the US. (lemmy.ca)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
38 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Is that even possible? If so, it is an eye opener for what is happening in the American economy and what is causing the MAGA movement.

Let's follow the evidence.

According to this article https://www.npr.org/2025/05/09/nx-s1-5375146/trump-tariffs-factory-jobs-nostalgia?

there are 12.7 million manufacturing jobs in America, down from an all-time high of 19.6 million in 1979.

According to this data base,

https://www.statista.com/statistics/437763/employment-level-in-canada-by-industry/

there are 1.8 million manufacturing jobs in Canada. Applying the standard 1-to-10 ratio (population ratio) that means scaled up proportionate to population Canada would have the equivalent of 18 million manufacturing jobs, just short of America's all time high of almost 50 years ago, let alone the current US job rate.

That caught me completely off guard. Puts a whole new perspective on what Trump is saying about the dire state of the US. Even compared to Canada, the US is in the pits.

Here is another data bomb. One quarter of those US manufacturing jobs are held by immigrants. Not sure WHAT to make of that one.

America does have a problem regarding manufacturing jobs. But tariffs certainly are NOT the solution. If Canada can out-perform the US per capita without the trade barriers of tariffs, exactly what does that say about the condition America is in?

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago (26 children)

You can't just focus on number of workers. You need to take into account the productivity of the workers as well. A farm that's entirely sown and reaped by hand could have 100 workers compared to another farm that has 5 workers with machinery, and yet the one with fewer workers could produce more food and value. It'd be wrong to say the farm with 5 workers is in a dire state just because of their low worker count.

Wikipedia has a list of countries by productivity of workers. While it's not focused on manufacturing specifically, the US has some of the most productive workers in the world and is significantly ahead of Canada. We likely have more workers per capita because each worker is less productive.

Anecdotally, I work at a Canadian manufacturing plant that's owned by an American company. The machines in our plant are from the early 2000s and there's a lot of stuff still done by hand. I've heard the US plants have the most cutting edge machines and produce 2 to 3 times as much product that we do in a day. Apparently, the only reason why the company has not gotten rid of our machines and turned the plant into a warehouse is because they pay Canadian workers comparatively less than their US workers. While the Canadian factories aren't producing nearly as much as their American ones, the cost per unit ends up being less due to lower worker wages.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

'Farm workers' are not included in manufacturing, they are in agriculture. Mentioning farm workers makes the rest of your 'facts' suspect. In point of fact, the agricultural labor market in America is giving the manufacturing labor market a run for it money, in terms of 'total wages'.

As the article states, the remaining US industries are primarily automated, requiring fewer employees. Mexico is becoming highly automated, as the American corporate world is building the automated plants in Mecico, not America, and a lot of US manufacturing jobs are leaving for Mexico. The jobs left after automation are usually low-wage 'floor sweeper/packager' jobs.

However, all of the manufacturing jobs Trump is trying to get back are all in the low productivity range. He wants to bring back mining jobs, for instance, in an industry that is already highly automated, or steel industry hard labor jobs in mothballed obsolete steel plants that are just not viable anymore. The only way the US will bring back mining jobs is to start digging mines by hand again. On the other hand, most Canadian industries are already highly productive. If they were not, at the Canadian minimum wage they would not be competitive. Most of the Canadian auto industry jobs have gone high automation, just to be competitive. Canadian manufacturing wages are actually higher than American wages. American wages are in the bottom level of income. The Southern 'right to work' wage rate is below the poverty level. We pay our auto workers more, but they are far more productive than American workers.

The piece that is missing is that Canada by and large has a population that has obtained a much higher tech education level than the US. Whereas the US just does not have the population sufficiently educated enough to do the jobs required in the remaining high-tech high-productive manufacturing demands, Canada has the educated labor force to actually run these highly automated high production machines.

That is why China is beating the pants off the US when it comes to automation. Not only is China and Asia in general building a highly automated highly productive manufacturing base, they are producing the graduates who can design, build, run, and repair these machines.

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